Rush Tempo Warrior Deck List Guide – Witchwood – May 2018

Our Rush Tempo Warrior deck list guide will go through the ins-and-outs of the off-meta deck from the The Witchwood Expansion! This guide will teach you how to mulligan, pilot, and substitute cards for this archetype!

Introduction To Rush Tempo Warrior

Tempo Warrior has been one of the most iconic tempo mid-ranged based archetypes of all Hearthstone. Its popularity has peaked during Whispers of the Old Gods, when first the Tempo and then the Dragon Warrior were very popular meta choices.

It looked like the introduction of Rush keyword, and the new Rush synergies will make the deck powerful again in The Witchwood, but so far the results were mixed. It’s far from the worst deck you will face on the ladder, but it’s mostly an off-meta choice.

There is a significant chance that Blizzard will print more Rush / Tempo Warrior synergies in the upcoming expansions and the deck will become better than it is right now.

Deck Import

Rush Tempo Warrior Mulligan Strategy & Guide

VS Fast Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

Town Crier – The best card in your deck by a huge margin. 1 mana 1/2 that draws you a card is insane, especially in fast matchups, where putting a body down on Turn 1 is big – for example, you can contest the Paladin’s early board while still drawing a card.

Fire Fly – While not as good as the Town Crier, still a good card to drop on T1 – it’s important to have some early drops.

Redband Wasp – The stats might not seem that good, but it’s often a nice tempo play against Aggro. If you run it into a 2/1, for example, you still have a 4/1 your opponent needs to deal with.

Frothing Berserker – This card could as well have Taunt, because your opponent will have to deal with it. It often comes down as a 4/4 (if you trade after dropping it) and it will grow out of control very quickly.

Woodcutter's Axe – Against decks that run 2 health early game minions – good keep vs Even Paladin, but not great against let’s say Tempo Mage. Can be also kept with Redband Wasp, especially when you’re on the Coin.

Blood Razor – Against decks that flood the board with small minions, such as Odd/Even Paladin. Not a great keep vs decks running 3+ health early game minions, e.g. Tempo Mage or Murloc Paladin.

Rush Tempo Warrior Play Strategy

Vs Aggro

In faster matchups, you need to take the Control role – trying to race them is not a great idea, at least not until the late game if the situation is right (more about that later). Rush minions give you a tempo advantage – thanks to them, you can dictate how most of the trades are going to look like. If you don’t trade correctly, Rush minions are as good as vanilla minions.

Early game is all about staying on the board. Try to drop minions / play weapons every turn if possible – don’t float the mana and try to not waste it on Hero Power in the early game. While getting some Armor might be useful later, it does absolutely nothing during the early turns. For example, if it’s Turn 2 and your only play is Acidic Swamp Ooze (you didn’t drew Redband Wasp or the Axe), you still want to play it. It might feel bad to not hit any weapon, but just Hero Powering means that you will already fall behind.

Weapons are quite useful in the faster matchups. The first one is Woodcutter's Axe – 2/2 for 2 is not great, but the extra effect makes it more interesting. The strategy is to play it on Turn 2 (or T1 with Coin), swing once, then play a Rush minion next turn (Redband Wasp or Rabid Worgen most likely, but it works great with Militia Commander later in the game) and swing second time. This way you can clear up to three minions – two with the weapon and one with the Rush minion, while leaving a significant body behind. Let’s say that you run a Wasp into a 2/3 minion after buffing it – it means that you end up with a 6/2 minion on the board, which is very threatening.

Your other weapon, however, might be even more important. Blood Razor is your only way to somewhat catch up against decks that flood the board. Two Whirlwinds in one weapon means that you can either clear the board of 1 health minions twice, or clear the board of 2 health minions over 2 turns. Might not seem like much, but it makes matchups like Odd or Even Paladin much easier.

And that’s basically your game plan until mid/late game. Trade, trade, trade. You can get some really good trades your opponent doesn’t expect thanks to the Rush minions – e.g. if you have a 3/3 on the board and he drops a Tar Creeper, thinking that you won’t be able to get past it, you can play Militia Commander, clear it, and still have a 2/2 on the board.

Once you get ahead in the mid/late game, you can start going face. Generally, you want to trade until you can put your opponent on a very fast clock. For example – drop a Frothing Berserker before a big trading turn, then it might grow up to ~10 Attack. Next turn trade with everything else and hit face with Frothing. You can do a quite similar thing, but even easier, with Grommash Hellscream if you have a way to activate it. If you get ahead, just drop Grommash + Activator, hit face for 10 immediately, repeat the same thing next turn most likely to win the game.

One thing worth mentioning is that while your DK Hero works really great in most of the Aggro matchups, there are decks against which you value your Basic Hero Power a lot. For example, against any kind of burn deck such as Tempo Mage or Odd Face Hunter. Unless you need the instant burst of 5 Armor, or you anticipate that the game will be over very quickly, you might leave your normal Hero Power and use it instead.

Vs Control

In slow matchups, instead of taking the Control role, you’re the beatdown. However, since Rush minions aren’t optimized to well, rush your opponent’s face, the deck has a much higher win rate against Aggro than against Control.

When playing vs a slow deck, you want to go all in and try to finish the game as quickly as possible. Realistically, you will run out of steam quite quickly and it will be hard to close out the game. Often you will need to rely on the early game snowballing to win the game. Generally, Control decks don’t start playing their AoEs until Turn 4-5, so you have a few turns to develop without worrying that your whole board will get destroyed. And even then, Frothing Berserker is out of range of most of the early AoEs, so he can carry the game.

Minion curve is very important. Since you won’t be taking advantage of the Rush mechanic that much, you wan to drop the Rush minions on the curve too, even with no target. For example, Militia Commander on T4 with no target to hit is basically a vanilla 2/5 minion, but it’s still better than doing nothing.

In order to not run out of cards very quickly, you might want to set up a 3-4 cards Battle Rage in the mid game. Keep in mind that Battle Rage draws a card for every damaged CHARACTER, which includes your Hero, which means that you might want to get at least some damage (e.g. clear a minion with a weapon). If you aren’t damaged, you won’t even be able to cycle it on the empty board.

Scourgelord Garrosh is pretty important in slower matchups, but mostly for his weapon – 4/3 weapon can be quite threatening already, and the fact that it can protect your board while you go face with minions is even better. However, realistically, you will often want to hit your opponent with the weapon, especially if you got him quite low already – 12 damage is A LOT.

Try to set up a Grommash Hellscream too, the earlier the better. If you drop it as soon as you can and immediately hit your opponent for 10, he might not have a good way to remove it yet. Alternatively, he might need to spend entire turn dealing with it (e.g. Siphon Soul – it’s so expensive that Warlock often can’t do anything more), which means that you will have the initiative again.

If you have some minions on the board already and your opponent drops something that you need to kill, try to use Rush minions from your hand instead of the ones you have on the board, even if the trade won’t be optimal. Minions on the board can already swing face – Rush minions can only attack minions, so you can gain tempo that way.

In the end, a lot of time you will need to rely on your opponent simply not having the right answers and hope that you can rush face before he can stabilize.

Rush Tempo Warrior Card Substitutions

Rush Tempo Warrior is a quite expensive deck, and requires a lot of Legendaries that don’t see common play in the meta. Most of them can be replaced, but the deck will get much weaker. Here is a quick look at the more expensive cards from the deck with potential replacements:

Darius Crowley – I’d say that the card is important, but not absolutely necessary. It’s a good mid game Rush minion that can snowball quite hard, but you might play the deck without it.

Grommash Hellscream – Your best late game finisher vs slower decks, I’d say that it’s almost mandatory, but you CAN try the deck without it, especially if you’re playing it as an anti-Aggro option.

Scourgelord Garrosh – Another card that is almost necessary. Hero Power can really wreck the Paladins, while the weapon is great in just about any matchup (either to control the board or just to deal more damage).

The Lich King – It’s just a solid value option. Not necessary in the deck, but you just need some “big guns” to win the slower matchups.

Town Crier – I’d say that this is the one card that you absolutely NEED in your deck – there is simply no reason to run Rush Warrior if you don’t have it.

And here are some of the cards that you can use instead:

Whirlwind / Warpath – Good cards that will help you against Aggro decks even more.

Slam – Flexible removal – you can use it as 2 damage for 2 mana to clear a minion, or as a way to initially damage the minion and cycle a card. The second option should come handy, since you have so many ways to finish the minions off, like Rush cards, Execute and such.

Forge of Souls – Weapons are a quite important part of your deck, so having the ability to draw them is not bad.

Armorsmith – Another good anti-Aggro option, it synergizes with Whirlwind effects, Rush minions, and lets you gain some extra Armor for free.

Leeroy Jenkins – While not a budget option, you might need some way to close out those Control games, and this is a good option.

A Hearthstone player and writer from Poland, Stonekeep has been in a love-hate relationship with Hearthstone since Closed Beta. Over four years of playing and three years of writing about the game, he has achieved infinite Arena and multiple top 100 Legend climbs.

To anybody who might be wondering- you really, really *need* Grommash in this deck. What tends to happen is that you will fill up your board with minions by turn 6, do a lot of damage, but none of them are that durable, so at that point your opponent will probably do something to wipe them all out, such as Defile, or Flame Strike or something. This is when they get cocky, and when you throw in Garrosh with one of your whirlwind effects (a 1 durability Blood Razor lets you do 12 face damage in the absence of Taunt minions while also enraging grom) to finish them off. I seriously think something like half my games end like this. If I had to choose between crafting Crowley or Grom, Grom would get my vote.

I also have a question about Ashmore. I got her as my free legendary, but I’m not sure how crucial she is. I don’t see any lifesteal minions that are really worth putting in this deck, and while drawing two rather than three cards is still great, you already have many, many powerful draw mechanics here. She’s also noticeably slow as a 6/6 body in comparison to most of the other heavy hitters in the deck.

How impoartant would you say she is? And what card would you replace for her?

Ashmore is a tough in the current state of the game. As already said in the comments below, she’s a great fit, but will gain so much more value over the course of the Standard year due to a bigger card pool.

A good replacement would be a high-value late game minion like Cairne.

Hi! This new archetype is quite fun to play with and against. It’s fair, and interactive. I tried this version and the new one by Firebat at Omni channel. It’s pretty interesting, I encourage you guys to check that build out too. Some heavy hitters from Lesser Mithril Spellstone, won me some games, those golems did.

So, first off, I love the idea of this deck. It can very easily turn into a face deck, too. But since I’m pretty new and have limited Dust, I think I’ll wait a bit before crafting the legendaries I’m missing (Darius and Grommash). I’m told the meta changes soon after an expansion releases and all that.

A couple of questions:

1. Is there any room for Arcanite Reaper here? The 5-mana spot is taken, but it could help those mid-game trades and compliment Grommash as a finisher.

2. How about Woecleaver? If the game lasts that long, the fact that this deck is chock full of Rush minions could really milk its Recruit effect. Granted, drawing those low-mana minions is also kind of likely, and would definitely suck (almost as much as recruiting Countess Ashmore and wasting her Battlecry).

1. There sure is. I theorycrafted this deck, and the current version has two copies of Festerroot Hulk, which I’m not a fan of; you could put in one Arcanite Reaper for one of those, it’d even fit the curve. You could then also tech in one Forge of Souls for one copy of Fire Fly or Battle Rage to have more guaranteed card draw (Blood Razor draws are incredibly important against Aggro).

2. Short answer: No. A Woecleaver that pulls out anything else than big 8-or 9-drops is the biggest waste of tempo, and this list is all about tempo. Don’t even try to wrap your head around it; if you want to play that card, play Gunspire Warrior 🙂

I see. Thanks! I keep looking for uses for this legendary and it just doesn’t fit into anything, but I’m still reluctant to dust it.

Honestly, I like this deck way better than any Baku decks I’ve seen. I’m not sure if I should care that a certain deck isn’t top tier- I’m pretty sure you could get to legendary with this deck anyway, and for now that’s all I’m after.

So is this deck any good? It seems like it has gotten out of the Theory Crafting section and looks like a legitamite deck right now. The only card I am missing is the Lich King which I do not mind scrapping some cards I don’t use for it. Lich King is used in alot of other decks so I might use it in the future. But what is the current situation with this deck?

The more Warlock you face, the worse this deck gets. There’s no point teching in Spellbreaker because it may at a few percent to a incredibly bad matchup, and that doesn’t add up to be meaningful anyway.

If the meta leans towards Aggro, this deck feels very powerful. Lich King is a great topdeck and an emergency insurance to snowball a board against Control archetypes, and it’s one of the best legendaries to craft at the moment (that’s my personal opinion).

Not that true, grommash is way better than leeroy since it can do up to 12 damage (with the bloodrazor pre-set) and leeroy can only do 6; then you can play grommash even not as a finisher but to trade and still get a 10/x meanwhile leeroy dies almost to everything; I think grommash is a must-have (i played this deck around rank 5 and I’m 34/12 for now, just replaced lich king, which I don’t think suits in a deck like this, for the DK which gives you an insane help with the hero power, being able to trigger berserkers, wasps, grommash and battle rage is insane

Skinken

April 14, 2018 at 1:38 pm

I don’t think Ashmore is good with only two targets, and she is not worth adding a janky lifesteal minion for (in that case you still only really draw 2 since you most likely won’t play the bad one). Curator was good for fetching and when you naturally had 3 cards (like murloc pala). Also the taunt helped a lot since you lose tempo when you play a big refill card.

Back in the days when I played midrange warrior (old gods meta) I played Acolyte of Pain for draw. That card is insane carddraw with wirlwind effects. Which this list has a ton anyway. It curves amazingly into Blood Razor or Warpath. I don’t see why you would not include it.

Well, i’ve been playing this deck and gotta say that ashmore is really usefull, it’s kinda guaranteed that you will draw a minion and a weapon since weapons have deathrattles, and you got tons of rushs.

Yeah in the higher ranks this deck just gets smashed. Kind of annoying because I’d rather play with something more interesting, new and fun. Rather than the generic same old *&@#$ decks we’re seeing from the last expac with minor tweaks. So disappointing.

So I’ve played a couple matches with this build (Thank you for posting it, it’s difficult to find a solid deck guide these days) and I got’a say, there is a big problem with the “Rush” mechanic: It’s too reliant on your opponent.
Most of these guys are bad minions if there isn’t a target for them to “rush” at.
You can really snowball the game if you get a big Berserker or a buffed Muck-guy with the weapon, but that’s about it.

Berserker is one of the keys of this deck, but it is not the only win condition, it’s true that if you go against taunt druid or cube it’s a loss if you don’t have the god hand but you totally crush hunters and paladins with the value trades you can get from rush minons and the aoe spells, with that said you must play your berskers and hulks very wisely in order to win, sure it isn’t a top tier 1 deck but i prefer playing something new and fresh insted of ordinary cubes or shudderwock shaman that already made the meta boring

The deck should probably play like a tempo deck – the wasp and Rabid worgen are pretty low in power level and shouldn’t be put in any serious deck. Muck hunter is also quite bad cause it needs to be immediately followed by a whirlwind effect otherwise it’s thrash. Darius as a 5 mana 4/4 is quite bad for favorable trading as well, opponent creatures will be usually bigger by that time. Countess doesn’t really make sense either in a deck that doesn’t have a great late game to tutor for a close up the game. Great for control decks but this is not one of them.

I think players underestimate the real value behind the Rush mechanic. Being able to interact with the board and to provide board presence at the same time is a powerful thing to do, and cards like Jade Lightning or Duskbreaker showed that in the past already. You can not only react to the enemy board but also proactively influence the board state for future turns, something that not many cards are able to do.

Besides that it can devalue the enemy’s future play(s) by quite a bit. Players can already experience that by playing around Duskbreaker for example.

Ashmore can be compared to Curator, and that card has seen a ton of play in high-tier tempo lists like Mid-Range Paladin. Having card draw on the top end of your curve as a tempo deck makes more sense than anything in my opinion.

It’s like a 2 mana deal 4, nearly dies to everything. So it’s still a 2 mana deal 4 but it can’t go trough taunts and that’s a big downside because the minions protected no by the taunts is often the ones you want to get rid off. And on turn 2 not many minions have 4 health although a lot have 2 attack witch will kill it. And yes you could play it later to get some value but then it doesn’t play among the curve.

I think the main benefit is the rush… Many people are overlooking this as it helps you win board control … If the opponent has a taunt minion up … playing another card that cant even attack on the same turn does you no better than 4 damage for 2 mana lol I believe this deck will be great but as always we will have to wait and see … I just cant wait to dust off my Gold Warrior

hi i think this deck is pretty good at the begin of the new meta i will test this deck on legend but i think we need to this deck more one mana drop like fire fly or dire mole
(sorry for bag english i dont use this language for 6 month)

Interesting thought! Many theorycraft lists include Spiteful Summoner and Spellstones, something that I have played a lot in a more tempo-oriented Pirate Warrior list in KnC. Definitely an addition that can make sense!

Spiteful Summoner and Spellstone seems too good not to run. I’d gladly give up Battle Rage for them. It’s the dropping Execute that’s questionable. Maybe going to one copy would work, but that’s something only testing can answer. But to fit in just Spellstones alone, you could easily drop Muck Hunter. You can’t really compare it to Leeroy as Leeroy can go face and is used as a finisher. the 1/1s are a mute point when you use him to win the game.

Due to the many possibilities of doing specifically 1 damage, i considered adding Rotface into the Deck. Turns out to provide a quite consistent late-game board, in case the opponent’s deck can provide resistance against your Tempo.

Overall the Deck is pretty good, though i “sacraficed” Ashmore for Rotface as I think it fits better.

With little to no modification, Master Oakheart offers incredible value with this list, especially given how many of the pulls will be able to impact the board immediately. I’ve been switching him and Lich King back and forth, and I am honestly leaning more towards Oakheart.

Do you think this deck will see play in the future. It seems like the meta is starting to set down just a bit but this deck sees very little play so I cannot tell how good it is. I have enough dust to craft everything I do not have in this deck but do you think I should wait it out even more or just go ahead and craft?

If you want my two cents I would wait it out. I think this deck is incredibly fun to play, but it sounds like you are somewhat light on dust, and I am doubtful it will be tier 1 when the dust settles. Also I think the meta still has some settling to do.

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